Letter #256: This is not a Post

To the window, to the wall.

Dad,

There’s a painting I think about a lot called The Betrayal of Images, by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. It’s famous: a picture of a pipe with the caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “This is not a pipe.”

I think this is in some sense a diabolical painting. Magritte was a wonderful artist, but he knew what he was doing when he called this piece The Betrayal of Images. He was saying two things: that images can betray you, and that the painting is an act of betrayal against imagery itself.

It’s an old observation that every painting is two things: a wall and a window. As a flat panel of oil and canvas, it’s just an object. But as a depiction of something else, it draws the mind into the world it symbolizes—the world of the landscape, the portrait, the pipe.

I say Magritte’s painting is diabolical because it denies the reality of that second world. Or at least, it denies that you can ever get from this world to that, from paint to pipe, from flesh to spirit. The mind leaps toward the picture, expecting to pass through a window, and crashes instead headfirst into the wall: “This is not a pipe.”

Well if this shape on this canvas is not a pipe, then neither are the letters P-I-P-E, or the sound they make when we roll air from our guts over the meat of our tongues. If this is not a pipe, if this wall is not also a window, then words are just sounds and paint is just slop.

It’s no accident that the modern crisis you traced yesterday has led us to a point where we can’t tell the difference between a human being and a machine posing as one. The other day I watched a fellow at a university explain, quite calmly, that “The day will come when AI will do all the things we can do” because “the brain is a biological computer, so why can’t the digital computer do the same things?” This paint is not a pipe. This sentence is not a thought. This body is not a soul.

Here's Magritte’s fellow French speaker, Jacques Derrida: “If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing.” Derrida suspected the connection between written language and conscious thought was a cultural and historic convention, and that computers might one day detach words from thoughts.

He was absolutely right—unless there is a soul. If LLMs can produce the same sentences humans can, we really will be left with our trust—another word would be, our faith—that words which serve as symbols of inner life are different from words tossed up as products of computation. The difference, I suspect, will be apparent only to those who have faith.

Love,
Spencer